A Different Shade of Black
by Dragonflae
Summary: She was a test subject, nothing more. And, like all failed tests, she was locked off in a closet somewhere to collect dust and act as a reference for how not to do something. She was sick of it, absolutely sick-she WOULD be recognized. She would NOT play their game any longer-no matter how much blood it took. Tokyo Black Cat Girl, potential pairings with Kisshu. Read if you dare.


**Hello, Fanfiction! Hot damn, it's been a while. Anyways, I needed writing practice, so I figured a little story on the side of my usual junk wouldn't hurt much.**

**Yes, I know, it's another revenge fic-I didn't even realize how similar it is to my other stories til I finished it. Oh, well. I actually intend to make this one go on for a few chapters instead of just a one-shot.**

**Also, this one doesn't revolve around my beloved Aoyama. Rather, it's centered around a little known character of Mia Ikumi's named Azumi, who was written as a prototype of Mew Strawberry and was actually meant to be a character for a horror series. I took the 'mew prototype' idea and ran with it.**

**Azumi's story takes place in the very back of the fourth volume of Tokyo Mew Mew. I recommend it-she's a little badass, she is. **

**I'll update after maybe five reviews, just so I can see what people want to read.**

**Enjoy 3**

It was dark out, naturally. She rarely came out in the day anymore. The night was cool and damp from the rain that'd poured earlier that afternoon, and the city glistened beneath her. Tokyo was always heavily populated, but tonight it seemed strangely empty. The lights of the buildings and advertisements were surreal, and the cars that whizzed past her perch appeared like some luminous, disembodied _yokai_; strange ghosts that roamed the landscape, longing for a place to rest.

She lit her cigarette and took a puff, the velvet ears atop her head twitching from the dull drone of civilization below. It'd been approximately five years since she'd gotten them. She was nearly nineteen, now; a young woman in bloom in the prime of her life. At least, she should have been in the prime of her life. She _should_ have been famous like the rest of them. They weren't any more or less special than her. There were only two distinctions that she could think of that separated her from the rest of that lot, the first being that she wasn't composed primarily of goddamned sparkles and glitter and the second being that she'd been made to keep herself a secret. She'd racked her brains over it, day in and day out, but no matter what she tried she couldn't find any more solid reasons. It drove her up the wall and down again, but she could never figure out the game.

Why?

The other girls were on magazine covers and television shows and comic books and were funded by the government exclusively for their deeds. They each had their own living conditions set to their liking, nice houses, free food, beautiful cars, whereas her own lonely self had been left to rot in her own squalor. Her high school life had been eaten up by the fighting-she'd been forced to drop out, and that shit just doesn't fly in Japan. Her parents disowned her because of it, and she'd been unable to get a respectable job since then, far less get into college. She'd been reduced to prostitution and illegal work as a hit-man, and even with that she was barely able to pay her rent. She'd been close to suicide several times. The only thing that kept her going was the premise of revenge.

And around six months ago, they came back.

Pointy-eared freaks from outer space, she'd mutter sourly. People were gushing and awing at the enemies-turned-visitors. They avoided the media the best that they could, minus the greenish one, who loved posing for the cameras. Even the heroines were glad to see them again.

She took another puff off her cigarette and got to work with the gasoline.

She'd tried to contact the brains behind the operation a hundred times, the American-born blonde that she, at one point, really thought she was close friends with. That was forever ago, sadly. After she demanded the equal due that the rest of the team got, the ensuing argument was so brutal that she left with a black eye and all her funding cut, what little they'd given her. She was the prototype, he'd told her. They even created fake aliens and monsters for her to fight as a test. That only lasted a few months before the _real_ ones showed up, and she got blown out of the water by a look-a-like in a pink dress.

She was crushed when she found it all out. She wasn't 'the chosen one' as she'd been told, she was an experiment. A lab rat. The bastards sent out a robot to do their work for them, with programmed responses and just fluffy enough to seem harmless. After they'd shown up at her house and told her what was really going on, that the whole magic-and-monsters thing was a set-up for a larger scale fighting force, they'd taken the impish thing which she'd grown to like, remodeled it and handed it over to her predecessor.

That bitch got everything she'd ever wanted.

The admirers, the fame, the fortune and all the fucking glitter anyone could stand to stomach.

She finally put the jug of gas down, wiping her brow from the work. Her attire had remodeled itself with an update a year or so ago, automatically. It was probably a built-in feature. Her beloved little black dress had been replaced by a leotard with a thong and boots higher than was really comfortable, with long, fingered sleeves instead of gloves. She'd chopped her hair off almost entirely, and the pink scarf had appropriately disappeared. With the heels, she was about five-foot-nine.

At least it was more adult.

A choked whimper escaped from the middle of her work, as the bound-and-gagged rich kid began coming to. He was only around twenty, and at this point reeked of gasoline like the rest of the rooftop.  
She rolled her eyes.

"Oh, shut _up_."

She kicked him hard in the stomach, and he yelped. With that, she strode back to the ledge of the building and took another long look at the city below. They'd know, soon, exactly what kind of people they were really cheering for. They'd know how quick they were to screw over their own if it meant their reputation. She couldn't wait to see their faces when it happened-She'd waited far too damn long to be quieted again.

She dragged in a last lungful of the cancer-stick in her hand, and smiled.

She dropped the cigarette, and turned her back as the flames engulfed the concrete and the screaming began.

Later that night on the news, there was a hit story making its way around the media world-a Japanese aircraft had caught a bizarre image of the roof of a flaming building. Firemen were rushed to the scene in helicopters, but the message had already been made.

Written by fire and surrounding a now-charred corpse of an unidentified male were two words that would set the country into a whole new kind of shit storm.

**B L A CK **  
**C AT**


End file.
